Not backing up work cost CERN the world's first web page which was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Picture:
Source: Supplied

IF ever there were a cautionary tale about the dangers of not backing up your work, this story is it.

Not backing up almost cost the world its very first web page.

The team at CERN, where the world wide web was invented, released a plea to help them restore the world's very first web page, which had gone missing.

The page was the creation of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who said that he and his colleagues were so busy trying to convince people that the internet was a thing they needed, that they didn't keep track of their early web pages.

"I mean the team at the time didn't know how special this was, so they didn't think to keep copies, right?," said Dan Noyes, a web manager at CERN who used to work a few doors down from Sir Berners-Lee.

Though the file isn't exactly what NPR was looking for, it is believed to be the closest copy of the original.

As it turns out Jones kept a copy of the page after he loaned Berners-Lee his computer for a presentation, and the two 'talked shop'.

"We talked about WAIS [Wide Area Information Servers] and WWW and beer - and he pulled out a floptical drive," he said.

"I installed Tim's graphical browser on my NeXT (computer). Tim talked me through using WWW by using a copy of his Hypertext 91 demonstration page."

Jones said Berners-Lee showed him "how simple and easy editing and creating a WWW page could be".

"First he showed how straightforward editing was by changing 'demonstration' to 'demonfdgfgstration,' he said. "I created my own page and added a link to an FTP site in Denmark that hosted a sound collection among other things".

"I wanted to see if the NeXT and Tim's WWW browser would be able to pass the sound to a player. I think it did, but I really can't remember if it did."

So during the whole process, Jones saved the page to his computer.

The only catch? He can't remember his password.

"There's plenty more stuff on that NeXT, only I've forgotten the password," he said.

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